great an extent two sides of the same human tangle. How far
does white labor see this? Not far, as yet. Its attitude toward
colored labor varies from the Russian extreme to the extreme
in South Africa and Australia. Russia has been seeking a
rapprochement with colored labor. She is making her peace
with China and Japan. Her leaders have come in close touch
with the leaders of India. Claude McKay, an American Negro
poet travelling in Russia, declares: "Lenin himself grappled
with the question of the American Negroes and spoke on the
subject before the Second Congress of the Third International. He consulted with John Reed, the American journalist, and dwelt on the urgent necessity of propaganda and organization work among the Negroes of the South.”
Between these extremes waver the white workers of the rest of the world. On the whole they still lean rather toward the attitude of South Africa than that of Russia. They exclude colored labor from empty Australia. They sit in armed truce against them in America where the Negroes are forcing their way into ranks of union labor by breaking strikes and under-bidding them in wage.
It is precisely by these tactics, however, and by hindering the natural flow of labor toward the highest wage and the best conditions in the world that white labor is segregating colored labor in just those parts of the world where it can be most easily exploited by white capital and thus giving white capital the power to rule all labor, white and black, in the rest of the world. White labor is beginning dimly to see this. Colored labor knows it, and as colored labor becomes more organized and more intelligent it is going to spread this grievance through the white world.
THE SHADOW OF SHADOWS
How much intelligent organization is there for this purpose on the part of the colored world? So far there is very little. For while the colored people of to-day are common victims of white culture, there is a vast gulf between the red-black South and the yellow-brown East. In the East long since, centuries
